History & overview · every faith gets one
A Chinese monotheism that became a state, and then a war.
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom — 太平天國, the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace — began as a village congregation in Guangxi called the God Worshippers, 拜上帝會. Its founder, Hong Xiuquan, taught that Shangdi, the high God of the ancient Chinese classics, is the God of the Bible; that the idols in the temples are demons; and that he himself was God's second son and Jesus' younger brother, sent to sweep the demons out of China. Converts smashed shrines, learned the Ten Commandments as the Heavenly Commandments, kept a seventh-day Sabbath, and banned opium, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, footbinding and the sale of women. In January 1851 the movement declared a kingdom; by 1853 it held Nanjing and renamed it Tianjing, the Heavenly Capital. It ruled a large part of the Yangtze valley for eleven years.
The Taiping fought the Qing state from 1851 to 1864 across sixteen provinces. Estimates of the dead from the fighting and the famine and epidemic that followed it start at 20 million and run considerably higher; it is among the deadliest conflicts on record. The kingdom also turned on itself: in the Tianjing Incident of 1856, Yang Xiuqing — its second figure and the voice of the Heavenly Father — was killed in Nanjing along with thousands of his followers, on Hong's orders and by his own commanders. The Qing suppression of the surviving population of Nanjing in 1864 was itself a massacre.
Why it is filed this way
Classifying the Taiping is a live scholarly argument rather than a settled fact. Chinese historiography for much of the twentieth century read it as a peasant revolution with a religious costume; Western scholarship since Jonathan Spence and Thomas Reilly has read the religion as primary and the politics as its consequence. It is filed here as a movement because that is what it was before it was a state, and because no body continues it.
Ended by force. Hong Xiuquan died on 1 June 1864 and Nanjing fell to Qing and allied forces on 19 July 1864; the surviving leadership was executed. No congregation survived, and the Taiping have no living successor — though later Chinese revolutionaries, Sun Yat-sen among them, claimed the movement as an ancestor.
The founding
Hong was a village schoolteacher from a Hakka family near Guangzhou who failed the imperial examinations four times. After the second failure, in 1837, he collapsed and was ill for weeks, and in that illness saw a golden-bearded old man who gave him a sword and told him to purge the world of demons, and a middle-aged man who helped him do it. Years later he re-read a Christian tract he had been handed in the street — 勸世良言, Good Words to Admonish the Age, by the Chinese evangelist Liang Fa — and understood the vision through it: the old man was God the Father, the younger was Jesus, and he was their kin. He baptised himself in 1843 and began preaching in the Hakka villages of Guangxi.
Its founding is bound to Hong Xiuquan — 1843 CE.
What it holds
Reality. Created and governed by one God, with the present order under demonic occupation and due to be cleared..
The divine. Strictly monotheist and iconoclastic: Shangdi alone is God, and the Buddhist, Daoist and popular deities are demons to be destroyed. Jesus is God's eldest son. Hong Xiuquan is the second son, and his general Yang Xiuqing was accepted as a mouthpiece of God the Father himself, able to fall into trance and issue orders that outranked Hong's. Protestant missionaries who visited Nanjing in the 1850s were badly divided about whether this was Christianity, and the argument has never closed..
Death and after. Heaven and hell, plainly stated. The faithful ascend to the Heavenly Father; demon-worshippers do not..